ICCRTS 2006 Agile and Adaptive coalition Operations Paper 078

11th ICCRTS
COALITION COMMAND AND CONTROL IN THE NETWORKED ERA
Title: "Agile and Adaptive Coalition Operations - Leveraging the Power of Complex Environments"
Topic: Coalition Interoperability, C2 Architecture, C2 Concepts and Organisations
Author 1 (POC): / Author 2: / Author 3:
Patrick Beautement
QinetiQ plc
AT119, Malvern Technology Centre
St Andrew’s Road, Malvern
WR14 3PS, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 1684 896057
E-mail:

This paper is part of a set being offered by Dstl and QinetiQ which discuss topics of current interest. Each paper stands on its own though common themes connect them.

ABSTRACT

All life is a competition for the control and use of resources and the world of military endeavour is no different in this respect. That competition takes place an environment - our world - which is complex. This paper characterises some of the challenges posed and offers strategies for not only making those challenges tractable but also for turning them to advantage. Throughout the worlds of the military, commerce and government and in everyday life we are increasingly connected through complex networks of relationships and interactions, which can be represented at different levels of abstraction. For coalition organisations, the key word is agility - being able to adapt to the uncertainties of the world without dislocation, which is as applicable to the cyberspace that supports them as it is to the real world that they inhabit. They must be capable of engaging in continuous and innovative adjustment. This paper considers some of the mechanisms which can be exploited at design-time, assemble-time and run-time (DART) to enable this - influencing the structures and relationships in purposeful entities such as networked enterprises and ensuring the collective, adaptive and secure behaviour of entities in cyberspace. The focus of this paper is on how to cope with, and leverage, the complexities of the real world, at run-time, to achieve decisive advantage for coalitions.

Introduction

A major challenge faced by modern military and commercial enterprises is how to exploit, to advantage, the capabilities of the highly interconnected, heterogeneous, ever-changing and always-on complex environments in which they operate. New approaches are required to address this challenge. Traditionally, at 'design-time', we try to anticipate every possible circumstance and then design-in all the necessary features that we think may be required. Worse, we often design-in current processes and so risk 'freezing in' failed or outdated procedures. Then, at assemble-time, we carry out putative deployments to test the design against 'the specification', reverting to redesign if necessary. Though this approach has worked well with mechanical systems it is limited in its utility in complex network-centric contexts (such as where coalitions are facing insurgents) where highly adaptive and 'edge-like' agile entities operate. This is because it is impossible to conceive, in advance, of every possible situation and so, without run-time innovation and adaptation, we are condemned to operate within the limited set of options identified at design-time.

Hence, there is a need to identify and embrace run-time mechanisms and approaches which will enable us to adapt and restructure whatever is required on-the-fly during operations. One way to do this, as chosen in this paper, would be to review and characterise the notion of design-time, assemble-time and run-time and identify what can best be achieved in each situation. In essence we need to know what are the appropriate things to be doing when we design and acquire things; when we structure and deploy them and then what we should be doing when they are employed to leverage the dynamic power of complexity to decisive advantage. The paper will also characterise a range of run-time environments as these affect what can be achieved. This means shedding some of our preconceived ideas about boundaries (what is 'ours' or 'theirs') and seeing that the 'battlespace' is actually everywhere and that absolutely anything is potentially a weapon[1]. In addition, the paper will touch upon the equivalent mechanisms which will need to be at work in 'cyberspace'[2] and indicate how run-time behaviours in this virtual world might be harnessed to augment activities in the real world - enabling us to shape and adapt to the unexpected - an essential requirement if we are to succeed in modern military operations.

THE CHALLENGES OF COALITIONS

The military domain is a very challenging environment characterized by uncertainty including the need to be able to deal with significant and disruptive dynamic changes. Despite an increasing trend towards adopting approaches from the commercial domain, military activities are different in one key respect - there are opponents who are doing their best to aggressively frustrate or destroy friendly activities and assets and to deflect or subvert allies or neutral actors. This means that nothing can be relied upon and that therefore key capabilities of agility include: the ability to adapt to (or shape) change; to be innovative, flexible and responsive (and grasp fleeting opportunities) and to be robust and resilient (in the face of potentially catastrophic disruption). Anything that inhibits these capabilities is unacceptable.

These military activities are driven by human decision-makers who need support in making sense of the environment and with reasoning about, and effecting, possible futures. Conflict is, essentially, a human activity. Consequently, when supporting human-led endeavours such as military coalitions, the primacy of the human must always be kept at the forefront. The nature of coalition operations (a teaming of people from many backgrounds with various views of the world) implies the need to rapidly configure incompatible or foreign systems into a cohesive whole. Several key principles apply, that:

  • the creation and maintenance of a cohesive coalition organisation (with real and virtual parts[3]) from the diverse and disparate 'come-as-you-are' elements provided by the coalition partners (people, processes and systems) is the key task which requires continuous, pro-active readjustment;
  • multiple coalitions (and other entities) may be active at any one time ('competing' for resources etc) and a decision in one may affect another concurrent operation;
  • partners may be part of a coalition - but their contributions may be anonymous (to protect sources etc);
  • coalition elements should be supported by appropriate IT in achieving 'unity of action' and the systems provided must be robust, secure, dynamic and adaptable and must not unduly constrain human actions. In coalitions, cultural diversity should be embraced;
  • "interoperability of the mind" is as important (for shared awareness and purpose), if not more so, than interoperability of systems. The difficulties are compounded in the virtual organisation of the coalition since there will be a mix of cultures, doctrines, equipment, operational procedures, languages, etc;
  • most coalitions will have commercial / civilian elements - appropriate interoperability will have to be provided with their infrastructures;
  • coalitions consist of loosely connected elements working semi-autonomously, and within their delegated authority, towards a shared purpose (as defined in the Commander's Intent). Elements need to rendezvous (and synchronise) only occasionally and must be free to optimise locally / snatch fleeting opportunities etc;
  • supporting the achievement of command agility (working in a flexible, unpredictable manner - where the decision-maker is the only thing on the critical path - leading to supremacy over the opponent) is vital. This is especially so in the crucial (and often overlooked) part of conflict - that of Execution and Battle Management;
  • enabling commanders to access relevant coalition-wide information (preferably as and when they demand it) to support their decision-making is crucially important to a successful outcome. Information should not be pushed according to some rigid, pre-determined process or design;
  • there is a pressing need to be able to set up coalition organisations / systems rapidly (in order to respond decisively to emerging crises).

Issues Arising from the Challenges

When reasoning about conflict one should always start by embracing the realization that nothing will be absolutely predictable and that being able to cope with uncertainty should be a fundamental aspiration. An aspect of this is the heterogeneity and complexity of the environment. Conflict with an opponent on a 'standardized' battle space will end up being an attrition war in some limited part of the conflict space. Instead, finding asymmetries (where you are strong and so can wield decisive advantage against an opponent) is an important manoeuverist strategy. This involves working with anything in the battle space which can be wielded as a weapon, including exploiting (even deliberately increasing) the complexity of the environment to undermine the opponent[4]. This includes cyberspace, which is a battlespace in its own right (not just a conduit for communication between people). It is a domain closed to humans and so 'cyberspace dominance' can only be obtained by using proxies to wield power on our behalf – such as software agents [1, 2, 3, 4]. The key is to always have available as big a range of options as possible (from which to generate novelty) as this is the counter to uncertainty.

Therefore, the challenges to be met come down to two main issues: having the structure and mechanisms to cope with or shape unanticipated or novel events in the wider environment, and: having the structures and mechanisms capable of operating in any type of threat environment (dispersed insurgents to defined enemy on a battlefield). For this paper, the key issues arising from the challenges are:

  • acknowledging and characterising the way the world the works and understanding how it impacts operations - that the world, and human organisations, are complex and that, for success, this complexity must be mastered and turned to advantage;
  • facing up to the limitations of the techniques and models usually employed in our business systems - that oversimplification has constrained what can be achieved;
  • perceiving the options and opportunities which exist and which are, as yet, largely unexploited - by developing suitable toolsets and exploiting existing mechanisms;
  • understanding how to embrace and positively exploit the complexities of the real world during operations - by using appropriate approaches and mechanisms to design, assemble and operate our military organisations and business systems.

Networked, Purposeful Enterprises

Our aim, therefore, should be to face up to these realities and always strive to create coalitions which operate as 'networked enterprises'[5]. Networked enterprises consist of organisations which are collaborative in that they are inclusive and flexible (as opposed to hierarchies that are authoritarian and exclusive). Because they recognise the need to cope with the uncertainties of the real world, they are agile and 'plastic' - able to combine and employ their elements on-the-fly in novel ways. They are also unconstrained - being able to adapt continuously to changing circumstances, including being able to cope with sudden opportunities, changes, dislocations or disruptions. Fundamentally, networked organizations can change their 'operational system'[6] [5] as needed to change or to exert influence in any domain where the organisation is in contact with other actors or the environment. Networked organisations should to be able to:

  • sense their environment and behave as if they are self-aware (enabling them to evaluate, assess and continually adjust their purpose);
  • be inherently unconstrained and not pre-optimised (they can cope with uncertainty and surprise as a matter of course);
  • encourage interactions among any and all of its members (eg: loyalty might be not just to local entities, but also to the overall enterprise) and other actors in the environment;
  • have 'power' available to be used where it is required (so that users can adjust the extent of their ability to act decisively);
  • uncouple command and control from the organizational structure, adding to the 'degrees of freedom' available (enabling them to seamlessly 'morph' organizational structures and flip between states without internal dislocation);
  • exploit the phenomena arising from their structures and from the wider environment (which are emergent, defined as arising from the various conditions in place and the myriad of interactions among the environment and other actors).

The perceived advantages of networked organisations are that they are agile and can adapt to any kind of adversary, operational environment, threat or damage - maintaining a persistent identity and purpose over time. In addition they can generate and exploit new means and opportunities - making them difficult to predict or undermine. They are agile, flexible, responsive and robust - lacking single points of failure - making them resilient to shock and dislocation. Their internal plasticity and ability to reconfigure means that they can, potentially, bring all assets to bear on a single crucial issue as easily as they can disperse effort across the world. However, their behaviour will never be completely predictable and, from certain perspectives, they may be inefficient. Finally, because they lack the internal boundaries that weaken power, they can act with unified and coherent purpose (al-Qaeda might be considered to be an extreme example) - even though they, and the loci of actions, are dispersed.

Complexity and the Wider Environment

The wider environment within which all human activity takes place is a complex adaptive system (CAS), itself composed of myriads of nested complex adaptive systems loosely connected through an ever-changing network of interactions and interdependencies. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss complexity in detail, but many good references and summaries exist (see [6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]). Overall, this complex wider environment has certain features that we must take into account:

  • Complex adaptive systems are ones where the outcomes do not follow in a predictable and repeatable way as they might with a mechanical machine - they generate problems which seem puzzling in their complexity (so-called 'wicked problems' [13]);
  • However, they do display various phenomena and behaviours which have identifiable characteristics (eg: stable emergent phenomena arise; networks have useful properties such as their robustness and ability to propagate power, information, influence etc);
  • The mechanisms which operate in complex adaptive systems fall into three main types which we can influence directly to our advantage: top-down, bottom-up and self-regulatory / self organising [14]. These mechanisms are always present and they are the ones which can be influenced by commanders / managers of organisations;
  • Linkages between purposeful entities and the wider environment are manifested in many types of interdependencies and feedback relationships. It is through these changing linkages that influence is propagated (where complex phenomena shows their hand).

In this paper we intend to show that, despite this, we can both derive pragmatic models of use to the military and business community and, if we employ appropriate strategies and approaches such as those below, can exploit the properties of CAS to decisive advantage in coalition operations and in commerce.

Approaches for Exploiting Complexity

It is apparent that there are different approaches and techniques which we should be employing when we design, assemble and when we operate enterprises at run-time. To do this, we understand how to exploit the appropriate mechanisms which operate in each of these spaces and should develop them further. Furthermore, we should understand the relationship between the spaces (ie what happens when an organisational unit is moved from, say, assemble-time to run-time in terms of the new opportunities which become available and strategies employed). Networked coalition enterprises are de-facto based on complex adaptive systems and, therefore, during operations, cannot be discontinued at will - they are always connected, always on. This means that, when something needs fixing / changing, we cannot stop, dismantle it, redesign it and try again. Instead, we need a set of on-line techniques available to enable organisational sensing, evaluation, assessment, learning and on-the-fly adaptation of behaviour. We also need to be able to manipulate the run-time environment to shape it to our will. The rest of this section addresses these issues.

Three Perspectives - The DART Framework

Given the context described above, strategies are required which recognise the characteristics of networked enterprises and their environments from three perspectives (shown in Figure 1, covering Design, Assemble and Run-Time - the DART Framework). Firstly, enterprises are composed from basic elements whose properties can be characterised at 'design-time'; secondly, these elements are then brought together at 'assemble-time' and thirdly, interactions between the elements and the wider environment only become activated at 'run-time'.

Figure 1 - One view of the DART Framework

If one is to effectively understand and shape complexity to advantage as a 'force multiplier' then the features and factors relating to these three perspectives need further study and elaboration. Key to this is realising that there are limits to what can be achieved at design-time, at assemble-time and at run-time and that these are not separate domains but a set of 'states' that we can flip between as circumstances change[7]. For example, depending on what needs to be done, we can flip part of our enterprise to the appropriate assemble-time configuration, carry out the change and flip it back again, say, into the operational, run-time mode.

Design-Time

Characteristics of Design-time. Our current approach to dealing with the complexities of the real world often employs system engineering - a design-time methodology. Here, one attempts to identify all the run-time requirements in advance and then develop a solution. In practice, the deployed system is usual constrained to display deterministic behaviour. Worse, existing socio-technical processes are digitised, 'freezing in' outdated or failed ones and limiting the space of options and initiatives which can be seized and exploited in future. Inevitably, the deployment of the system changes the environment and the original premises on which the requirements were based no longer hold - resulting in endless change requests and an inability to either generate novelty or deal with the unpredictability of the real world [15]. Hard won experience [16] has proved that a different approach is needed to generating, deploying and employing structures and systems which can really address complexity. At design-time we determine the basic features of building blocks, define their enduring features (which will enable them to be assembled into more meaningful functional units) and construct them ready for assembly.